CarbonHQ & PowerUP Selected for Gold Standard's Digital MRV Pilot Program
Pioneering the Future of Carbon Credit Verification in Clean Cooking
CarbonHQ and PowerUP have been accepted into Gold Standard's groundbreaking digital Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (dMRV) Pilot Program. Running through October 2026, this two-year initiative will test and validate how digital solutions can transform carbon credit verification—making it more accurate, transparent, and cost-effective.
About PowerUP
Founded in 2021, PowerUP makes electric cooking accessible and attractive through a unique business model: energy efficient e-cookers sold through small payment installments that are cheaper than charcoal expenses, all subsidized by climate finance.
Since launching, PowerUP has expanded across Africa and Asia, with their first Gold Standard project registered in Uganda and delivering up to 2 tonnes of CO2e reduction per device annually. Their cloud data platform provides the foundation for the dMRV solution now being piloted with CarbonHQ.
“Being accepted into Gold Standard’s dMRV pilot is an important milestone for PowerUP. It will allow us to lower monitoring costs, improve transparency, and accelerate credit issuance as we scale.
With CarbonHQ’s platform, we’ll have the digital infrastructure to meet these requirements and unlock even more value for our projects”
Kato Kibuka, PowerUP, CEO & Co-Founder
The Challenge: Traditional MRV is Breaking Down
For years, carbon credit verification has relied on manual processes that can't keep pace with market demand. Project developers face periodic surveys prone to recall bias, labor-intensive data cleaning, opaque credit calculations, and fragmented reporting systems that create version control nightmares and security risks.
These inefficiencies don't just slow down verification, they make carbon credits more expensive to produce and harder to trust. As scrutiny of carbon credit integrity intensifies, the market needs a better way forward.
Gold Standard's Response: Digital MRV at Scale
Gold Standard launched its dMRV Pilot Program in October 2024 to assess whether digital solutions can solve these systemic challenges.
The pilot's findings will inform how Gold Standard integrates digital solutions into its broader certification framework, potentially transforming MRV for thousands of projects worldwide.
What is really exciting is that through the program, up to 75% of credits can be issued on an interim basis every 90-270 days, with a 'true-up' after the full verification at the end of the monitoring period.
This is potentially game-changing for carbon project developers, as earlier access to credits significantly reduces reliance on external project financing.
Our Solution: End-to-End Digital Verification
The CarbonHQ-PowerUP solution eliminates manual intervention across the entire MRV workflow, from data collection to carbon credit issuance. Here's how it works:
Smart Hardware Meets Cloud Analytics
PowerUP's Electric Pressure Cookers come equipped with calibrated energy meters that automatically record cooking duration, energy consumption, and usage patterns. Each device stores over 3,000 timestamped records locally—nearly a year of data—making the system resilient even in Uganda's rural areas where internet connectivity is sporadic.
Automated Data Processing
Field agents extract encrypted usage data via a secure mobile app. This data flows into PowerUP's AWS-based platform where automated validation pipelines flag anomalies, verify timestamps, and transform raw readings into clean datasets.
Every processing step is logged and traceable through OpenLineage and CloudWatch, creating complete audit trails.
Once the cleaned data reaches CarbonHQ, additional automated validation checks ensure project data quality—cross-referencing usage patterns, identifying inconsistencies, and flagging outliers before credit calculations begin.
Integrated Impact Assessment
CarbonHQ brings together energy usage data with beneficiary demographics and impact surveys collected at the point of sale and through follow-up assessments.
This comprehensive dataset enables accurate carbon credit calculations while capturing the human impact of clean cooking adoption.
Automated Credit Quantification
CarbonHQ applies Gold Standard's Metered & Measured Energy Cooking Devices methodology to automatically calculate emissions reductions.
The platform generates audit-ready reports with full traceability from sensor data to final carbon credit figures, enabling verification bodies to review and certify results efficiently.
Built for Scale
This isn't just a pilot project—it's a platform.
The architecture is designed for expansion. Cloud-based infrastructure enables geographic scaling without local data infrastructure.
CarbonHQ's modular design allows adaptation to different project types and methodologies beyond clean cooking. And because we're building a subscription-based platform rather than a custom solution for one project, other developers can access robust dMRV without building their own systems from scratch.
“For us, getting into the dMRV pilot is a big step.
Our appliances have embedded energy meters that provide reliable usage data, and linking this with CarbonHQ creates a full digital MRV system — from data collection through to calculation and reporting.
CarbonHQ really did the heavy lifting on the application, and working with them gave us confidence every step of the way. I can honestly say they’re the right partner for dMRV.”
Wim Witdouck, PowerUP, CTO & Co-Founder
What's Next
Gold Standard's pilot program validates our approach and positions us at the forefront of carbon market transformation.
Over the course of the pilot, we'll refine the solution, gather evidence of its effectiveness, and work with Gold Standard to shape future dMRV requirements.But the implications reach far beyond this pilot. By proving that digital MRV can deliver better accuracy, lower costs, and stronger transparency, we're helping build the infrastructure for trustworthy carbon markets at scale—making high-integrity carbon credits more accessible to projects fighting climate change worldwide.
Ready to digitize your carbon credit verification? Contact us to learn how CarbonHQ's platform can support your projects.